go 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XV. No. 366 



with clear definitions of adulteration, and adequate means for the 

 enforcement, by the co-operation of State and National authori- 

 ties, of its provisions in regard to this class of fraud, the food 

 sophisticator will pursue the even tenor of his way undisturbed. 

 The European Continental legislation on this subject is much 

 superior to the English act. ' Under Continental statutes, every 

 dealer is held responsible for the quality of his merchandise, 

 whether of foreign or domestic origin, and every food material 

 must be sold under its true name ; artificial products imitating a 

 natural product must be properly labelled in a conspicuous and 

 legible manner ; all unwholesome foods are confiscated and de- 

 sti'oyed without compensation to the owner; and adulterations 

 generally are considered acts of fraud. Suitable police super- 

 vision and control are provided for the enforcement of these 

 statutes; and, although these laws are somewhat of a paternal 

 nature, they are much more effective than any we have. 



The avei-age American repudiates the idea of a paternal govern- 

 ment supervision over his affairs, or any thing tainted with the 

 idea. He realizes that he is a full-grown man and a sovereign, 

 and that therefore he is perfectly comisetent to take care of him- 

 self ; and no cheat or swindler can ever get the better of him. 

 He may be willing to support, even to clamor for, a legislative 

 measure to regulate the production or sale of a food, product, 

 provided it advances his particular business interests. He would, 

 however, regard with apathy any general law that would guar- 

 antee to the public the liberty of purchasing pure food, with a 

 reasonable certainty that they were not imposed upon in their 

 purchases, if it was incunrbent on him to take the necessary 

 steins to execute its provisions by bringing samples for analysis, 

 etc. 



It may be, however, that some day he will reach the conclusion 

 that his individual smai-tness, gi-eat as it may be, is not sufficient 

 to wage successful warfare against the food sophisticator' s com- 

 binations, which have made this country for years the choice 

 dumping-gi-ound of the frauds of Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

 When this happens, we may hope that the proper laws will be 

 passed to suppress the fraud, and that we, the chemists of tlie 

 country, will have opened to us a new field of usefulness, — a 

 field in which we ought to put forth our best efforts, with the 

 constant aim to maintain the purity and wholesomeness of the 

 food for suffering humanity. 



THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN FACULTY. 



In a paper read before the Neurological Society, Dr. Romanes, 

 has presented in very convenient shape an outline of his recent 

 work, "Mental Evolution in Man," which, being at once 

 authoritative and brief, may be appropriately noticed in these 

 columns. Taking for granted the truth of his first proposition, 

 that no exception must be made in the case of the human 

 mind to the law of continuous evolution, — a proposition 

 fully discussed in the original work, — Dr. Romanes concentrates 

 his energies upon tracing the probable causes and history of 

 this transition from the intelligence of brute to that of man. 



For this purpose it is found necessary to agree upon a work- 

 ing classification of mental products or ideas. The division 

 adopted is that of simple ideas, which are simply the traces 

 left in the mind by a sense-impression, — the se^^Wg with the 

 mind's eye, as it were; of compound, or, better, generic ideas, 

 wliich are obtained by a fusion of several impressions, and so 

 involve some amount of comparison; and, finally, of general 

 ideas, which are named abstractions, — a symbolic mode of 

 referring to a group of ideas. These may be more briefly 

 referred to as percepts, recepts, and concepts. The first two 

 are common to animals and men. A dog has a generic idea of 

 man, and a simple idea of some particular man; but he 

 cannot make the third step, and call the one by the word 

 "man" and the other by the word "John." This is the 

 distinction most usually insisted upon as dividing men from 



1 For copies of European laws on food adulteration see Reports of the Com- 

 missioner of Internal E,erenue for 1888 and 1889 ; and for a summary of their 

 eading features see Science, 1 0, xiv. p. 308. 



the most intelligent of animals, and not only involves a sub- 

 stitution of a symbol for an idea, but, to get this idea, requires 

 the mind to look in upon itself and observe its own actions, — 

 introspection or self-consciousness. While these concepts may at. 

 first be very simple, they may be subjected to mutual comparison, 

 and the relations thus deduced again give rise to concepts, and 

 thus a kind of algebra of recepts and their corresponding con- 

 cepts be formed, — an algebra of the imagination, in which alt 

 the higher intellectual work is accomplished. Now, the differ- 

 ence between a mipd capable of however limited a degree of 

 conceptual ideation and one having only receptual ideation is 

 usually agreed to be the possession of language by the first, and 

 its absence in the other. We must therefore consider the 

 mental powers involved in language. Language, considered 

 broadly, is the faculty of making signs: this intelligent animals 

 do. The dog barks to have the dcor opened, a parrot will give 

 rise to sounds to express its wants, and so on. But there is a 

 broad difference be'tween this which is receptual sign-makingj 

 and the peculiarly human conceptual sign-making. The 

 man can think about the name, which is to the animal merely 

 an association of sound with thing. "The difference between 

 naming a thing receptually by mere association, and naming 

 a thing conceptually by intentional thought, is all the differ- 

 ence between knowing that thing and knowing that we know 

 it." It is, then, the genesis of the self-conscious faculty that 

 forms the special object of study, — the faculty that enables us. 

 to think of words as words, and of ideas as ideas. But we 

 must remember that even in the human infant there is a stage 

 of sign-making anterior to self-consciousness. There is first 

 the indicative stage, in which the child, like the dog or parrot,, 

 makes intentionally significant signs or tones; there is then 

 the denotative stage, in which the child uses names receptually 

 by mere association, just as the talking birds do; upon this 

 follows the connotative stage, in which a child will apply a 

 name not alone to the object with which it was first learned, 

 but also to objects with varying degrees of similarity to it, 

 — will extend the meaning of "bow-wow" from the house 

 terrier to other dogs, to pictures of dogs, to a person imitating 

 the dog, etc. (parrots have been observed to possess the rudi- 

 ments of this connotative stage) ; lastly there is the denomina- 

 tive stage, where the name is consciously bestowed as such (this 

 occurs in the child between the second and third yeais, when 

 the chtid arranges its names in statements) . It is important to 

 note that the first three stages occur in animals, but that they 

 occur in a very much more perfect development in the child, 

 before it reaches the distinctively human form of speech. The 

 receptual intelligence of the child is greatly in advance of that 

 of any animal; although this supremacy must not blind us ta 

 the fact that it is a difference of degree only, and not of kind^ 

 This preconceptual intelligence, of a child is superior to that of 

 a dog in the same sense as the dog is more intelligent than a 

 bird. An intelligent chimpanzee. Dr. Romanes believes, would 

 "follow a child through what would probably seem a surprising 

 distance in the use of denotative names and receptually con- 

 notative words," if it had the power of articulation; and it 

 would, too, under this condition, have been able to ' 'answer us in 

 the same way that a child answers us when first emerging from 

 infancy.'" From hereon, the child rapidly advances beyond 

 the capacity of any animal, though it has still a long develop- 

 ment to pass through before it reaches the truly human or self- 

 conscious stage. A very large share of mental activity at this 

 period is formed by the making of propositions which, to distin- 

 guish from the later propositions, may he called preconceptual 

 propositions. If a child sees its sister crying, and its words, 

 for the person and the act are "Dit ki," this is a statement, 

 but one made for the child by the "logic of events." It is: 

 not conceptual or introspective, but is of the "psychological 

 kind that we might have expected a monkey to make, if a 

 monkey had been able to pronounce denotative names as well 

 as it can understand them." Up to this point we have been 

 considering differences of de.gree only : the issue is thus, 

 narrowed down to the transition from the preconceptual to the 

 conceptual stage. 



